Build 2020: Avoiding AI problems

I have been asked many times during the past month whether the heightened pressure that enterprises are now facing as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic will cause them to short-cut aspects such as responsible machine learning in order to get pilots into production more quickly. This is certainly a possibility, but in my opinion, people's memories of the actions that enterprises are taking now will run much deeper than many of the better-planned projects that came before the pandemic or have yet to start. More organisations will therefore aim to get artificial intelligence (AI) right during the crisis as well. As practitioners get going in this area, here are a few things to consider. One global bank I spoke to recently has just put in place a policy that no AI model can move into production without some interpretability and bias controls built into the lifecycle of the application.